[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia articles could use more primary references

Sat Jan 10 14:53:58 UTC 2004

dpbsmith at verizon.net writes:

> I would really like to see more use of attributions,
> references, citations within Wikipedia.  Traditional
> encyclopedias don't do very much of this, but I think
> this is a serious weakness on their part.  The
> traditional encyclopedia simply speaks _ex cathedra_,
> and the only reason you have for believing it is
> that "they wouldn't print it if it weren't true."
> ...
> I remember being shocked in high school when I learned
> for the first time that an encyclopedia could not be
> referenced in a scholarly article because it didn't meet
> scholarly standards for attribution.

I agree; this is why I usually try to cite sources,
articles, interviews, etc. This fits in well with our NPOV
policy. Person X says Y about subject Z. 

See, for example, our article on [[The Bible and history]],
which has a fairly extensive bibliography. More Wikipedia
articles need to refer readers to primary sources.

> I don't know why print encyclopedias don't choose to
> reference their sources. Presumably it's limited space,
> and/or a desire not to clutter up the article with
footnotes.

I am sure that this is precisely the problem they faced.
However, Wikipedia has no limitations on text; we have room
to document every important point in every article. We don
not even need to clutter up the main article to do so; if
footnotes or references ever get too long, we can add them
as a footnotes page, such as (proposed):

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_footnotes
  or
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History (footnotes)
  or
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History/footnotes

Robert (RK)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus